


Liminal Probability

by DreamerInSilico



Series: Original flashfic [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Fae & Fairies, Flash Fic, Gen, Tarot, Urban Fantasy, or are they?, the scary kind, was going for a World of Darkness vibe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 13:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13590591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerInSilico/pseuds/DreamerInSilico
Summary: She draws a tarot card every night before she goes to bed.





	Liminal Probability

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr and written for Chuck Wendig's weekly flashfic challenge; prompt was "insomnia."

She draws a tarot card every night before she goes to bed.   **  
**

It’s an old, private habit, a remnant of the teenage occult phase that everyone probably thinks she’s fully out of.  She no longer believes the cards can predict the future, but she still finds it fascinating what they can tell her about her own thoughts, her own mind.  

Or that’s what she believes in the daylight, anyway.  At night, though… her tiny, high-rise apartment is never truly  _quiet,_  for the city around her never fully sleeps, but sometimes the urban background noise blends into something a little less mundane after midnight, and the cityscape beyond her balcony becomes a canyon of glittering lights.  It is then that those things her rational mind knows as coincidences can still make her skin ripple with gooseflesh and the sense that there just might be something  _else_  at play.  

One night, she draws the Moon.  Her eyes flick up to the rare, coin-bright yellow full moon that hangs fat in the sky, and she shivers.  She goes to bed half-expecting strange dreams, or even nightmares, for the Moon is a card of imagination, whimsy, and shadowed forests where eyes glint in the dark.  

Instead, she’s fairly sure she doesn’t sleep at all.  

Lines of dialogue from a play she is to be in keep dancing through her head, intermixed with fragments of music and eventually, laced through with frustration.  She is tired, and though her conscious mind is a pleasant place to be most of the time, she would like to set it aside for a while.  

In the morning, she glares at her tarot deck on the way to the coffee pot, then struggles through the day despite her fatigue.  (College isn’t so very long-past that she can’t still handle sleep deprivation, at least.)  

That night, she draws the Moon again and blinks down at the card warily.  “Really, now?” she whispers to it before shaking her head and setting the deck aside.  Statistically speaking, it’s rare to draw the same card twice in a row, but she has kept this nightly ritual for years, and it has certainly happened before.  

If she sleeps that night, it is only in the shortest, lightest of dozes, the sort that are only half a breath from wakefulness.  She knows this because in the morning she distinctly remembers looking at her bedside clock at roughly two, three, five, and six o’clock.  The insomnia is more frustrating than any other instance of it she has previously experienced because it doesn’t seem to have a reason: she isn’t particularly upset or worried about anything to an out-of-the-ordinary degree.  She isn’t especially tense.  

She just… can’t sleep.  

The day passes in a haze, and she feels at several points that she could drift off and sleep like the dead if she let herself.  Sometimes she has wisps of thought that drift through more like dreams than her usual, more structured consciousness, but she is still moving, working, speaking.  

The Moon makes its third appearance that night, and then she is frightened.  

She does not sleep, and eventually just gives up and turns on the lights when it feels like the shadows of her bedroom are breathing.  

The next day is a Saturday, and she hopes that maybe when the sun is up, she will be able to quiet her mind enough to nap.  

She can’t, despite treating herself to a long, warm bath and a mug of her favorite herbal tea, first.  

The sunlight seems bright and harsh and every loud, human noise of the city beyond makes her flinch.  Eventually, she closes all the blinds on her windows and settles down with a movie she’s already seen many times, hoping (albeit not strongly) that it might lull her into nodding off for a while.  

It doesn’t.  

There is a tinkling sort of music that seems to pervade her apartment, as if ghosts follow her about playing handbells.  It isn’t unpleasant in its own right, but she knows it’s a bad sign.  She makes herself call her doctor’s office and schedule an appointment, though that hardly helps in the immediate term.  

Dusk falls, and she sits on her balcony, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the slight chill that heralds the passing of summer into fall.  (That night, in fact, she realizes.)  She can no longer hear the noises she associates with the city, even though she knows they must be playing into the music.  

_(In shadows creep, at doorways peep)_

She used to make up rhymes in her head, so the first words don’t register as sound so much as her own imagination, although they call an uncomfortable level of attention to the fact that she could not have chosen a more perfectly liminal place to sit other than perhaps directly on the threshold of her apartment.  Every faerie story she’s ever read or heard comes back to her, then.  She’s sitting on several borders in time and space and she knows she should go inside, at the least.

_(In silence, song; in right, a wrong)_

Maybe leave the apartment altogether, go somewhere,  _anywhere_  else with other humans.  That would… ground her, wouldn’t it?  

_(An in has an out; a whisper, a shout)_

She’s half-afraid that if she goes through another door, what’s on the other side won’t be anything familiar.  

_Fly or fall, you hear our call_

The words are stronger, more present.  She’s almost certain she’s actually hearing them, now.  There’s a kind of wonder to it, in addition to the fear, and she struggles to objectively evaluate whether her situation is as simple as sleep deprivation-induced hallucinations, as unlikely and outlandish as someone having surreptitiously dosed her with some unknown, absurdly long-acting drug, or as even more unlikely and outlandish as… something else.  

_In safety, fear_

_As far draws near._

She hadn’t planned on drawing a tarot card that night.  Or rather, had explicitly planned on avoiding doing so.  As much as she’s tried not to be superstitious about it, the concrete weirdness has been stacking up rather quickly the last three days.  

But now she rises, almost without thinking about it, and pads back into her dimly-lit apartment to collect the deck and carry it back outside, leaving the sliding door half-open.  

_This is stupid_ , she thinks.  _You always used to tell yourself that if_ you _were in one of these stories, you wouldn’t play with fire._   

But there’s also something special, in a way, about being in a story and realizing it.  

Slowly, but with strangely steady hands, she shuffles the deck, thinking that perhaps if she draws something, anything else, it will break the spell.  (Then her hazy mind helpfully supplies a hypothetical handful of other cards that could be even more ominous in her present situation, and she’s almost as afraid of not drawing the Moon as she is of drawing it.  There are darker cards, for a surety.)  

Barely daring to breathe, she draws a card.  

When morning breaks, the outer apartment door is still locked.  The glass door is still half-open.  A blanket lies in an abandoned puddle of fleece on the balcony.  

And a deck of tarot cards is being slowly scattered by the wind.  


End file.
